MODO 701 - Vertex Normal Toolkit
If you're a MODO user, I've put together a toolkit for controlling vertex normals.
It includes;
- A bunch of tools for controlling edge smoothing (Maya-style), but also has full smoothing group support (better than MODO's native support).
- Some "final pass" normals options, including area weighting, angle weighting and "high quality" normal calculations for better non-planar poly normals.
- A tool for converting vertex morph maps to vertex normals and options to set up vertex normal map naming.
- A tool for transferring normals from the background mesh to the foreground mesh (like the Normal Thief 3DSMax plugin).
Tool tips should give enough instructions for use.
Bear in mind that the vertex normals get baked in object space, so if you've made any geometry edits, you'll need to hit the "Update Smoothing" button.
You can find it over on the Luxology forums here.
It includes;
- A bunch of tools for controlling edge smoothing (Maya-style), but also has full smoothing group support (better than MODO's native support).
- Some "final pass" normals options, including area weighting, angle weighting and "high quality" normal calculations for better non-planar poly normals.
- A tool for converting vertex morph maps to vertex normals and options to set up vertex normal map naming.
- A tool for transferring normals from the background mesh to the foreground mesh (like the Normal Thief 3DSMax plugin).
Tool tips should give enough instructions for use.
Bear in mind that the vertex normals get baked in object space, so if you've made any geometry edits, you'll need to hit the "Update Smoothing" button.
You can find it over on the Luxology forums here.
Replies
http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77203
http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77203
Updated my vertex normal toolkit to v1.8;
http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77919
Major overhaul to v2.0 will come with 701 SP2, once the Python API supports the stuff I need.
Texel Density toolkit works great. Simple and easy. Nice work.
Made a mini-update to the texel density kit, screwed up the argument check. Please re-download, sorry!
http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77203
New features (from 1.2) are the option to auto-select the UV map of the texture via the quick-pick commands.
Updates (from 1.2 and 1.3) are fixes for action centre of "set each poly" mode, stops non-fatal suppressed errors being spammed to the event log, stops non-fatal error getting render output size.
http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77919
http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77203
For MODO 701 SP2 only, it's now been rewritten as a Python API plugin, so it's a lot faster than before.
http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77203
- Added "Normalize" button. You could technically do this before by clicking Get Islands/Set Each Island with nothing selected, but this will run it in one go without altering the current texel density value.
- Get/Set/Normalize with nothing selected will respect fully hidden islands, too (partially hidden islands will still be processed as if they were unhidden).
- Improved "quick" options, they'll now work so long as you're moused over a polygon. Previously the command only ran when in poly mode. It doesn't alter the current selection now, either (it used to drop/reselect polygons before/after running).
http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discussion/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77919
Windows ONLY, Mac version coming soon hopefully.
- Complete rewrite using the C++ SDK.
- Now works for all releases of MODO 701, not just SP2.
- 10x faster, twice as glib.
- Improved smooth group handling.
http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discussion/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77919
- Added "Transfer Vertex Normals" function that lets you copy the normals from the background mesh to the foreground mesh.
- Fixed the "Toggle" button - the default auto option wasn't properly working.
- Made some small code improvements so the update function doesn't leave 100% discontinuous values in the vertex normals.
- Rejigged the UI to move the lesser-used commands to a second tab.
Is it possible to have the effect only applied to the selected face only? it'll be really great to have that when we want to use the "Transfer Vertex Normals" function.
*Currently my workaround is to cut/ paste the face that I want the effect to be applied to the new temp mesh layer > press button > cut/ paste back to the original mesh layer > verts weld.
A little bit off topic though;
How do we specified the dimension of the kit's UI dialog box? using the .cfg file?
You can call it OCD, but I'm really annoyed with a kit's UI that has a rather large empty space, since your's one has a tight fit and clean and precise dimension to the kit's UI so I thought you can give me abit of advice on how to do that?
http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discussion/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77919
- Added option to sum the weights of coplanar polygons for area weighting, also exposed a tolerance value for it.
- Added option to harden polygon UV boundaries. This acts differently to the harden edge UV boundaries, and gives the same effect as the "Smoothing Group from UV Shells" of 3DSMax plugins like Textools and PolyUnwrapper.
- Added an extra argument to all harden commands, which will soften all other edges. You can activate this by CTRL+clicking on the interface buttons.
- By default, the harden and soften buttons are now mode sensitive.
- In vertex mode, harden/soften will harden/soften any edges with both ends selected (SHIFT+click to have it harden/soften any edge connected to the selected vertices).
- In edge mode, it works as before, hardens/softens selected edges.
- In polygon mode, it works as before, hardens/softens the boundary of the current polygon selection.
- The harden UV button is also now mode sensitive.
- In edge mode, it will perform the original uv-boundaries-to-hard-edges.
- In polygon mode, it will perform the smoothing-group-per-island style of smoothing.
- Simplified the UI as a result of the mode sensitive arguments.
- Convert/Toggle commands are now on the ALT/CTRL click of the Update button.
- Revamped icons, as I lost the source PSD for the old ones :P
Note: If preferred, you can still call the harden/soften commands explicitly, using the (optional) arguments of soften/harden:{vert/edge/poly/uv/edgeuv/polyuv/angle} connected:{true/false} (note: connected only has an effect when dealing with vertex modes) and soften:{true/false} will soften all others when using a harden command.